Mental and Physical Awakening: What’s the Difference?
AWAKENING
What is awakening? What does it mean exactly? What are we really talking about? There are many levels to waking up from who you thought yourself to be. When you identify as a separate self, the identity we call ourselves in this world, we are unconscious to the larger field of awareness that we are living in. As consciousness becomes known within us and the unconscious becomes conscious, there is a recognition of these two aspects of the self. The small ego self and the larger field of awareness. They are both existing, like two sides of the same coin. As the larger field grows you become less attached to the small identity, recognizing that this aspect is driven by will, by gaining something for itself, in essence it is totally and completely driven for receiving something in return. It is the self-motivated aspect of yourself, the part of you that takes things personally, that cares what others think, that works hard to put on a persona and a character to the outside world. This aspect does not want to lose itself. It is totally and completely attached to itself, like clinging on for dear life with every possible threat.
If awakening is leading us home, or to God, or the ultimate Truth if you will, then the process in which we arrive back to wholeness is our own individual journey. There are certainly paths you can follow in life. There are various religious and spiritual paths you can practice, you can commit to these and see where it leads you, however there is the individual’s path Home. The question is are you listening to your own internal guidance that is leading you exactly where you need to be.
The concept of awakening is not a new one. It has been in existence as long as man has been alive. Many contemplatives throughout history have documented their states of being in solitude seeking a unitive state with the Divine. In the unitive state there is the awareness of the self and the recognition of the Divine. However, if the ultimate path is to lead us back to the ONE, the essence of God or the Godhead, the place where God simply IS, then is this state felt by the self, or is the person becoming the Divine alone without the self? This is a question to ask, and one to think about as you experience the awakening process. Is there a place where the entirety of self disappears and all that remains is the Divine, meaning there is no experience of anything outside of this one essence? Is this possible in the human experience? If it is possible, it seems there is nothing to fall back on, no center, no self-reflection, or inward ability to fall back on something. The center is totally and completely dissolved and there is nothing left for the human except pure sensory perception. The late Bernadette Roberts explains her personal experience with losing the self totally and completely. She documents what’s possible in human form beyond consciousness itself. You can dive into her books if you’re interested in this aspect that is often difficult to understand, especially if you have never experienced or thought about it. BERNADETTE ROBERTS: BOOKS
Bernadette beautifully explained how it’s possible to live in the human condition with the cessation of consciousness itself. This is her description of the last step before returning to the Godhead, the complete end point of consciousness itself. The notion of subject and object is obliterated. In order to return to the Godhead as ONE, this seems to make sense. Bernadette’s experience offers unbelievable insight into a very misunderstood process. There is very little written about what she discovered, however, not everyone who experiences such things writes them down. This topic is also not popular. The experience of no-self is devastating to the ego, as well as to the popular trends claiming consciousness is who we really are. Until we are there, do we know exactly what we really are? We can only watch the process unfold, see what aspects of the self have left us, try to make sense of what has transformed, and be where we are in our own spiritual journey.
AWAKENING OF MIND
There are subtle perceptual shifts when the mental aspect begins to wake up. This can begin with a desire to see differently and to change your perspective on what you see in front of you. You could argue that this is still part of the small self in search of something. When the mind is seeking it typically desires and expects a certain outcome. There is a big difference from looking for something with a preconceived idea of what it should be like, and looking for something without an agenda. It’s important to notice what aspect you find yourself in. Are you expecting a mind-blowing ecstasy to occur and you are willing to do whatever it takes until you “achieve” that outcome? Or are you allowing yourself to experience what unfolds before your eyes? Are you detached from needing your awakening to fit into a certain category? Are you comparing your journey to a famous sage and now you think you should have the same destiny? The mind can be very tricky so it’s important to remain open to wherever your specific journey is leading you. Are you controlling the ship, or are you being guided by something greater?
When discussing the mental awakening, the shift in how you can see can be very profound, so profound it transforms your entire life. You may have been someone believing in your limitations, your victimhood, and continuing this “woe is me” attitude that never seemed to get any better. When you were brought to a new vantage point inside the mind, which shifted you into a larger perspective of who you are, you recognized you were believing everything was happening to you. Now, with your new shift in awareness you see that you can choose how you see any given situation you are experiencing. Whether the experience is good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong, you no longer see through the pendulum, but rather you choose to see all of it as an opportunity to learn in the classroom of life. Waking up to this decision maker in the mind, this place where you can actively choose how you want to see, how you want to interpret information, is a major change in your life. You suddenly realize that you can decide how you want to see experiences in your life. The power is within you, and this can be a game changer for many people.
The deeper aspects of the mental awakening are stepping outside of thought and joining with the observer field. This allows you the space to see what is behind the watcher. If you are able to watch your thinking mind, who and what is the watcher? Even if you don’t know exactly what you are yet, you certainly are being shown that the thinker is not it. Being able to pull out of mind and connect with the larger field of awareness is showing you there is much more than what you believed yourself to be. This is a non-judgmental place to view. There are no thoughts, no chatter, just pure awareness with a compassion and acceptance of all things. Within this field of awareness, there is a stillness you may become familiar with, where a quieting of the mind occurs. Thoughts may be less obsessive, less repetitive, and less annoying when you learn to find the center point of calm within. The more you put your attention on the stillness, the inner silence within, the more it will grow in your life. Instead of attaching to the mental chatter, you will breathe life into the calm center and feel this sacred space within. This can bring about experiences of nothing, of emptiness, of a loss of certain parts of your identity that you used to attach to. Moving into the center can bring about a unitive state with the Divine, which is what many contemplatives are seeking in their lives.
PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE OF AWAKENING
Most information available is about the mental shift of mind and disconnecting from thought. This type of awakening allows a sacred space to open up within. However, there is more that can be experienced through a spiritual awakening. There are many ways to think about how this might happen. To keep it as simple as possible, as David Hawkins famously labelled the levels of consciousness, you can think of moving into higher levels of the field of awareness. Each new level has a different frequency that can be very taxing on the physical body, especially upon the initial encounter. When your nervous system experiences an entirely new wave of frequency that it has not yet adjusted to, this can cause a period of extreme discomfort, disorientation, and a complete inability to function normally in the world for a period of time. Hawkins described the higher levels being so difficult on the human nervous system that even sustaining a body could be challenging. Suspension of the human faculties can be experienced. One could simply leave the body at a certain point. Looking deeper at his discoveries may help you if you are struggling with any physical disturbance during your own personal awakening. David R. Hawkins – Live your life like a prayer (veritaspub.com)
At some point in the awakening process there will be other dramatic shifts and periods of adjustment as the self continues to fall away. This is inevitable on your way to ultimate Truth. You may not immediately recognize what has changed until you realize what is no longer present. It is difficult to identify something until it has left you. It’s easy to think you know something, especially when it comes to experiencing things of the world, however, when aspects of yourself start to disappear, it is only then that you notice something is missing. Putting your finger on it is quite another thing altogether. Eventually, in time, you can sense what has shifted and what it is exactly that feels so different. This can be a very physical experience. It can make a drastic difference in how you experience the world around you.
In my own personal journey, there came a moment, after years of living with the observer, or the awareness of the self, and the larger field of awareness, a burst of energy went off within the center of my head and everything in my view came flooding into my vision faster than I had ever experienced before. It seemed I was receiving more sensory information than I knew was possible. This was totally overwhelming, not to mention shocking to my nervous system. I knew in that moment that something incredibly profound had ocurred within me, but what that was, I could not comprehend at the time. It took months to recognize what was so different. The difference was I no longer felt the recognition of self and the other awareness, it was if there was only one field, nothing to fall back on, nothing to see within myself, just the extension and expansion outward. I no longer felt separate from anything else. There was no where I began and no where I ended. I felt as if I extended in all directions, everywhere if you will, which made living in the world extraordinarily challenging. Imagine stepping into a crowded space, with all the sensory information available, and you receive all of it. Not only that, you feel like you are extending everywhere, that you are in every corner of the space. When your body is unfamiliar with this experience, it is enough to make anybody want to retreat to the calm and quiet, like bee line it to your cozy closet and shut the door behind you forever! My sensory system was heightened beyond belief, like I was living in all the five senses and beyond, and that’s all that life became. My life literally felt as if it was the sensory system experiencing anything I was around, and there was little mental interpretation of anything. It seemed that I had become the field itself, at least that is what it felt like. I can only explain it in the way it was experienced. Did the merging affect my nervous system in some way? Was my entire cellular structure shifting and changing? I cannot speak to that. I can only go off of what I lived, and felt from moment to moment. In fact, it seems that’s all I was doing, living in a pure sensory state of being. When the mind seems quiet, and the observer self falls away, I was left with an intensity of life that pulled me out of the world for many years. The energy of it seemed to much to bare, and I simply didn’t want to feel it. Over time, I felt a pull outward again, that there was a movement back into the world again. However, learning this entirely new way of being was just the beginning of learning something I had never known before. All that I could do, was take one step at a time, see how to receive these sensory signals, and become a master of my own nervous system. Keeping it calm became a priority.
This was so new to me. Never had I heard of any type of physical awakening or spiritual transformation that could cause this much change in a person. I came across a few accounts here and there, but it seems living it is the only way to know it. And this was my destined path. I didn’t like it at the time, however now I see the beauty of it’s unfolding, and the movement within that has guided me, and continues to do so to this very day. The nervous system has calmed, and the system has adjusted. What was once entirely too much to take on, is now a blip on the radar. However, the sensory system is alive and always aware of the surrounding environment I am in. I am not sure that will ever change. I remain open to the possibility that there is more that will inevitably fall away.
ADJUSTMENT PERIOD
No matter if you have experienced shifts in your mental awareness, the detachment from thought, or you are physically going through transformation, there is a period of adjustment, a settling in if you will. This period, or periods, are different for each individual depending on the level they have gone through. There may even be many adjustment periods, and there will be as long as we are still moving toward Truth. If this is happening to you, take the time to reflect on why you feel different? What is it exactly that has shifted? Can you pinpoint what has left you? If you are struggling and uncomfortable, focus on what feels well to you now, even if it’s something very small. Focus your attention on what is working for you, rather than what isn’t. These can be helpful questions to ask if you are uncertain of what has actually happened.
For example, during my major shift, I noticed later that I no longer felt solid and separate like I used to. Previously, I felt very grounded, separate, and solid, meaning I felt the density of the body. I felt that I was the subject that was here and anything else was the object outside of myself. When this shift occurred, I felt a lightness within my body that I had never felt before. It seemed I was no longer fully attached to the physical like before, that there was now a new energetic sense that I was feeling. Whether it was a heightened frequency of sorts or simply the feeling of pure sensory information, I cannot say for certain. I simply go off of what I was discovering in my new experience. I also felt the dissolution of separation. Even though my physical eyes still saw separate objects, I no longer experienced it in this way. It’s as if I moved into everything around me, that somehow, I was getting an up close and personal view of everything. Even viewing the scenery around me seemed different, like it all merged into one flowing art piece that didn’t seem real. This took time to get used to, as it was so radically different than my previous experience of life.
You will have to take the needed time for yourself during your own personal journey back toward Truth. If your experience is mentally transformed but you’re physical experience has not altered, you may not need as much time to adjust. You may be perfectly fine adapting to your new way of seeing as you continue to live a normal life in the world. As the process continues to unfold, if that is your destiny this lifetime, then there may come a time when physical adaptations, adjustments, and time to get comfortable become your reality. Always honor where you find yourself along your own path. We all go through what we need to when we are ready to do so, even if our mind disagrees. Something much larger than ourselves will set the tone, will guide us in the direction for our highest learning. It’s only a matter of time for each and every one of us. It is the purpose of life itself, to return to our real Home in God. It could be summed up simply as God Is, and everything else eventually falls away.